Louise Remembers

I was a child in Dublin during the war

By Louise Smale

I was living in Dublin during the war. As you know Ireland was a neutral country. One night when I was about ten years old, my father ran in shouting “quick get your clothes!”. There was a lot of noise which I found quite exciting! My brother, who was about seven years old at the time and knew all about bombs, said there was a bomb coming. We heard this whistling noise and then this huge explosion came completely out of the blue. My father was trying to get his overcoat on over his pyjamas, they didn’t have dressing gowns in those days, and we all went out into the street; everybody was out there.

The bomb had blown up a whole street about a mile away from where we lived; quite a lot of people were killed. The rumour going round was it was an RAF aircraft as relations between England and Ireland weren’t great at the time but it wasn’t until a week later when there was an apology from the German government saying a German pilot had accidently dropped the bomb thinking it was Belfast.

I had thought it was very exciting until I realised that so many people had been killed. One bomb doing so much damage.